Misco owner reports bumper profits

Systemax, the parent company of Tiger Direct has announced bumper profits of $69 million (£34.2 million) for 2007, a rise of 54 per cent on 2006.

The US-based retailer, which also owns UK e-tailer Misco, also recorded sales of $2.8 billion (£1.4 billion), an increase of 19 per cent over 2006.

"In Europe we saw strong sales growth in both business-to-business and internet sales as the strategies that we implemented over the past several years continue to show substantial returns," said Gilbert Florentino, president and CEO of TigerDirect. "[Q4] Sales increased in North America by 18 per cent and in Europe by 21 per cent."

Florentino cited the firm's expansion into the consumer electronics market as key to the company's growth during the year.

"Our product expansion strategy to compete in the area of flat panel TVs and other consumer electronics equipment has been paying off by helping us drive more customers to our selling channels and increasing our opportunities to build customer value," he added.

Indeed, building customer value was one of the key threads throughout the call; with Florentine describing how the pending reopenings of the CompUSA stores it purchased last year would provide the idea opportunity for the company to provide unprecedented levels of service.

"We're current reopening the CompUSA stores that we acquired this quarter and in the long term intend to rebrand our US TigerDirect stores as CompUSA leaving us with a single retail brand strategy," he added.

"We feel that CompUSA has a tremendous amount of brand equity and we will be capitalising on that in the future."

In the last several weeks we have completed the acquisition of 16 former CompUSA retail stores in Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico. As of today, we have reopened nine of those locations as the new and improved CompUSA retail outlets and we anticipate that the remainder will opened within 30 days.